Gigi Parrish Movies

Long before its "Teen Agers" series of the 1940s, Monogram Pictures went to college in the minor musical Girl of My Dreams. Heading the somewhat over-aged student body are BMOC Larry Haynes (Edward Nugent) and track-star Don Cooper (a handsome young Lon Chaney Jr., here still billed as Creighton Chaney). The story's focal point is a student election, which obliges Larry and Don to neglect their campus sweeties Gwen (Mary Carlisle) and Mary (GiGi Parrish). Comedy relief comes from Sterling Holloway and Arthur Lake, cast respectively as the school newspaper editor and a fresh frosh. One suspects that the people who made such pictures as Girl of My Dreams never set foot in a real college. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Set within the steamy Louisiana bayous, this melodrama chronicles the reconciliation between an embittered bereaved mother and the daughter she always blamed for her husband's demise. The woman lost her spouse just before her daughter was born. Though she was very pregnant, she and her husband decided to go for a walk through the swamp one day. Unfortunately, he got trapped in quicksand. Encumbered by the baby within, the woman could do nothing but watch him slowly die. Upon her daughter's birth, the angry mother refused to care for the infant and later refused to allow her schooling. Finally, the caring neighbors intervene and take charge of the child. Eventually, the mother sees the light and begins loving the child when she discovers that her beloved spouse had been having an affair. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

The musical picture that ended Lou Brock's career as an RKO Radio producer, Down to Their Last Yacht is almost festive in its awfulness. The nonsensical plot finds a group of impoverished socialites (including Sidney Blackmer and Marjorie Gateson) trying to raise money by renting out their yacht, offering themselves as crew members. When a nouveau riche family charters the yacht, everyone is marooned on the tropical island of Malakomokalu. Here blonde jungle queen Mary Boland rules the roost, demanding that the shipwrecked men make love to her and the island's hootchy-kootchy native girls, or suffer the consequence of being fed to the sharks. Once regarded as the worst film ever made by RKO, this legendary flop is actually a lot of fun in a "high camp" sort of way, with the love scene between Mary Boland and Sterling Holloway a particular highlight. Two future co-stars of Laurel & Hardy's Babes in Toyland, Felix Knight and Marie Wilson (her film debut), have small roles. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Easily the best of Eddie Cantor's gargantuan musical comedies for producer Sam Goldwyn, Roman Scandals begins in the middle-America community of West Rome, where our hero Eddie (Cantor) is employed as a delivery boy. A self-styled authority of Ancient Roman history, Cantor bemoans the fact that the local shanty community is about to be wiped out by scheming politicians, certain that such an outrage could never have happened during Rome's Golden Days. After a blow on the head, Cantor wakes up in Imperial Rome, where he is sold on the slave auction block to good-natured tribune Josephus (David Manners). Cantor soon discovers that the evil emperor Valerius (Edward Arnold) is every bit a crook and grafter as the politicians in West Rome, and he intends to do something about it. He gets a job as food taster for Valerius -- a none-too-secure position, inasmuch as the emperor's wife Agrippa (Veree Teasdale) is constantly trying to poison her husband -- and does his best to smooth the path of romance for Josephus and recently captured princess Sylvia (Gloria Stuart). Cantor's well-intentioned interference earns him a session in the torture chamber, but he escapes and commandeers a chariot, setting the stage for a spectacular slapstick climax. On the verge of recapture, Cantor wakes to find himself in West Rome U.S.A. again, where he quickly foils the modern-day despots and brings about a happy ending for all his friends.

Co-written by George S. Kaufman, Robert E. Sherwood, George Oppenheimer and Arthur Sheekman (the soon-to-be husband of leading lady Gloria Stuart), Roman Scandals manages to get off a few clever satirical licks, but essentially it's a "lappy" lowbrow vehicle for Eddie Cantor, and in this it succeeds immensely. The Busby Berkeley-staged musical numbers, written by Harry Warren, Al Dubin and L. Wolfe Gilbert, must be seen to be believed: In "No More Love", Ruth Etting, playing the Emperor's cast-off mistress Olga, sings a plaintive torch song as dozens of enslaved Goldwyn Girls (including Lucille Ball and Barbara Pepper), wearing nothing but long, blonde wigs, are chained to a rotating pedestal; and in "Keep Young and Beautiful", these same maidens gleefully cavort around a Roman bathhouse in the near-altogether while Cantor, in blackface, hops about, rolls his eyes and claps his hands -- just before a jet of steam "shrinks" him, at which point he metamorphoses into midget Billy Barty! The quintessence of Depression-era escapism, Roman Scandals is must-see entertainment. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide